Eliademy recently started crowdsourcing OER (Open Educational Resources) online courses in order to democratize education worldwide. OER are educational resources such as texts, images, videos, assignments, courses, etc. which are freely accessible to anyone and can be used to teach and learn. They can be part of the public domain or released under a license allowing free use, adaptation and distribution. According to the OER Research Hub, teachers notably share OER in the format of videos, images, lesson plans and quizzes [2]. Online courses are also increasingly released as OER, even if they are still only a few. This trend represents a huge progress in the democratization of education for a number of reasons.

OER courses are accessible to all anywhere, anytime. To access OERs, one just needs an Internet connection and the will to teach or learn. As a result, OERs have a great potential in reducing the educational gap between different regions of the world or within countries.

OER courses make it easier for teachers to create their online course. Everywhere in the world, teachers can reuse others’ course material, adapt it to their own audience and mix different open resources. Indeed, “86.3% of educators adapt OER to suit their needs” [3, p13].

OER courses save money to both teachers and students. By using OERs, teachers and learners can save costs on the realization of a full quality online course or on quality education (buying expensive text books, enrolling to expensive courses…). Thus, “88.4% of learners say that the opportunity to study at no cost influenced their decision to use OER”[3, p5].

OER courses are a great way to create outstanding courses collaboratively. By improving each other’s courses and sharing between them, teachers find ways to teach students online more effectively. It has been shown that teachers communicate more between them when they use OERs [3, p16, p21].

OER courses contribute to the spreading of ideas and inspiration all around the world. In a study, the OER Research Hub found out that 79.5% of the educators participating in their survey use OER to get new ideas and inspiration [3, p5].

OER courses help keep the course content up-to-date. Building on top of each other’s OER courses allows teachers to update the content while keeping the good basis of a course that has been thoroughly thought.

If you are looking for a platform to create OER online courses easily, try out Eliademy. After having created your course, you just need to choose to license it under Creative Commons licence BY-NC-SA to make an Open Educational Resource. Eliademy makes it really easy to reuse OER online courses as any teacher can copy a whole OER instantly within the same platform, allowing him to focus on modifying and adapting the content without having to put it all together.

Why do you specifically suggest licensing work under the BY-NC-SA Creative Commons licence? That’s one of the most restrictive. Their CC0 waiver or their Attribution (BY) license would be much more conducive to making those resources as open as possible.

Sergey Gerasimenko

Honestly, BY-NC-SA simply seemed like a good choice couple of months ago. Afters seeing feedback from many users over the past weeks we will switch it to more a more permission BY. In the long run we want to offer instructors a chose which license to use, but we don’t want to make things overly complicated now. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.